Various desktop display mechanisms are currently used to notify users when computing events occur in the background of a computing environment (e.g., while the user is focusing on a particular application, window, or other view). For example, events or alerts may relate to incoming messages (e.g., instant messages, e-mails, etc.), application crashes, download alerts or statuses, security issues, network connection statuses, or other hardware and/or software related events. Existing systems often use visual and/or audio alerts to notify users when such events occur, such as flashing icons, chimes, and/or popup windows. These types of alerts, however, often divert a user's focus away from a current task by bringing focus directly to the alert. Such diversions can cause abrupt and often unwelcome changes in the user's focus and attention, possibly affecting the user's current task. For example, the user may be typing a password when the focus abruptly shifts to an event, possibly leading to an incorrect password input, or an accidental display of the password, among other things.
Existing systems often use dialog boxes to alert users when events or alerts occur. For example, an event or alert may be generated by a running application, a hardware component, or other aspects of a computing environment, where functionality may block, pend, or otherwise wait for the user to sufficient action to resolve the event or alert. Thus, events or alerts often require the immediate attention of the user. When several windows are open at the same time, however, dialog boxes or other visual indicators may remain hidden under or “buried” by one or more open windows. In another example, existing systems may fail to provide adequate notification to users because audio alerts may not necessarily be heard by the user (e.g., when system volume has been set to mute, or the user has stepped away from a computer, or for other reasons). As such, existing systems fail to provide users with non-intrusive visual indicators to alert or otherwise notify the users when various events of interest occur in a computing environment.
Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.